| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: flimsy envelopes, or a soiled volume in paper covers with a
promising title. Now and then it happened that one of the faded,
yellow dancing girls would get sold to an amateur, as though she
had been alive and young.
Sometimes it was Mrs Verloc who would appear at the call of the
cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in
a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy.
Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable
indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer
of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at
having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would
The Secret Agent |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: existence, and are recovered by reminiscence (anamnesis) or association
from sensible things. The sensible things are not realities, but shadows
only, in relation to the truth.' These unmeaning propositions are hardly
suspected to be a caricature of a great theory of knowledge, which Plato in
various ways and under many figures of speech is seeking to unfold. Poetry
has been converted into dogma; and it is not remarked that the Platonic
ideas are to be found only in about a third of Plato's writings and are not
confined to him. The forms which they assume are numerous, and if taken
literally, inconsistent with one another. At one time we are in the clouds
of mythology, at another among the abstractions of mathematics or
metaphysics; we pass imperceptibly from one to the other. Reason and fancy
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign
undisturbed in the remainder of the body. There is no distinction
on the face of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull,
and one pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which of
them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair
to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw
split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it.
There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a
claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a
great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is
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